Who is responsible for one million people killed in India after independence? Gandhi has to accept that he was responsible for forty years’ repression, and when the pressure was gone – Britain had moved with her armies out of the country – it erupted like a volcano.

In fact, Adolf Hitler’s violence with the Jews was far more peaceful, because he killed people in the most up-to-date gas chambers, where you don’t take much time. Thousands of people can be put in a gas chamber, and just a switch is pressed. Within a second you will not know when you were alive and when you died. Within a second, you evaporate. The chimneys of the factory start taking you, the smoke – you can call it the holy smoke – and this seems to be a direct way towards God. The smoke simply goes upwards.

But the violence that happened in India was really cruel, ugly, barbarous. Children were mutilated, killed; old men were mutilated, killed. Trains were burned, buses were burned, houses were burned. All over India there was freedom to kill. There was no rule, no government; nobody could prevent it.

But psychologists have not looked into why it happened, who is responsible for it. I make Mahatma Gandhi responsible for it. That’s why I had compared Mahatma Gandhi with Adolf Hitler. If you look just at the sentences where I compare them, you may be confused. But if you go into all the details of why I did it, you will not be surprised.

I had compared Adolf Hitler also with so-called saints living in the monasteries. That was not to praise Adolf Hitler – but you know the German mind, they could not get the point. They have never been able to get the point. It was said to condemn the saints in the monasteries.

Adolf Hitler really lived like a monk. He used to get up very early in the morning, the way monks are supposed to get up. He used to go early to bed, at exactly the time that every monastery follows. He was a vegetarian. To be a vegetarian in India is simple – everybody is, but in Germany to be vegetarian…. He never ate any meat, any fish, he was absolutely a vegetarian.

He lived his life almost entirely in an underground cell; just the way monks live in their cells in the monastery, he lived in an underground cell. He was a bachelor almost his whole life, except for the last three hours when he got married.

Hitler never allowed any woman to sleep in his room. His reasons were different: the monks are afraid that they may get interested in the woman; Hitler was also afraid, but his fear was different: his fear was that the woman might kill him when he was asleep. Who knows if she is a spy? He never allowed anybody – man or woman. He would lock the door from the inside, because in sleep anything can be done to you.

He never trusted anybody, he had no friends. He lived a very structured life. That’s why I said he lived like a saint in the monasteries. Why do you praise the saints in the monasteries? – because of their disciplined, structured life, ascetic life. But Adolf Hitler fulfills all these conditions.